Challenge

Sixty-five percent of traffic to LIVESTRONG.COM was from female visitors and the amount of time they spent on the site was below industry averages. I worked with the editorial and analytic teams to understand why. We found that women and men had significantly different goals when visiting the site and that women felt less confident in the content when mens content was present.

Solution

Working with the editorial team, we created gender specific channels, features and content which increased engagement among LIVESTRONG.COM’s audience. Gender based content increased the amount of content, increased SEO reach and provided more targeted opportunities for our advertisers.

Feature Strategy

Challenge

Our vast library of video and article content attracted visitors to the site, however building a subscription model based on content alone was going to be challenging as there is a lot of competition offering similar content. We needed to create a utility feature that bridged our users goals with our content.

Solution

Working with the analytic team, I identified a large percentage of our visitors were consuming weight loss and nutrition content. Through research, I found a very early stage website that allowed users to count calories and track the nutrition values of the food they consumed. We acquired the company and I quickly created our first subscription based feature ‘MyPlate’ by creating an intuitive UX that was easy to use and customize while expanding our SEO reach by parsing their database into content pages.

The food nutrition section was among the most popular on LIVESTRONG.COM. MyPlate is that feature interfaces with the database and encourages tracking of calories, sodium, fat and other dietary intakes. MyPlate tracks and provides real-time analytics to achieve individual users goals.

Exercise content was another popular section of LIVESTRONG.COM. MyLoops is a feature that allows users to create, explore and track running, walking and hiking routes. Distance, elevation, gender and age is used to calculate and track performance and metrics goals.